This invention relates in general to a telephone system and, more particularly, to a telephone system in which communication with the telephone is effected through a packet-switched network.
In a facility or situation where several telephones are required, the traditional approach was to install wiring which served as dedicated telephone wiring. In recent years, however, as the use of computers has expanded, the need for communication between computers has caused organizations to add an additional level of wiring, which is a network to interconnect the computers.
It has been previously recognized that it can be advantageous and cost-effective to use a single network of wiring to effect both telephone services and communication between computers. To this end, telephones have previously been developed which can be coupled to a traditional computer-type network, such as a network conforming to the industry standard commonly known as Ethernet. While these existing network-based telephone systems have been generally adequate for their intended purposes, they have not been satisfactory in all respects.
More specifically, each of the telephone units in an existing system usually has only a moderate amount of intelligence, and is limited in its functional capability by the fact that it basically operates under the control of a central control unit commonly referred to as a call manager server. As a result, the typical telephone is only as powerful as the call manager server to which it is a slave. It is difficult or impossible for third-party vendors to provide new features for such a telephone. In fact, even the manufacturer of the telephone system would typically need to develop and deploy a software upgrade to the call manager server in order to add new functionality, and such an upgrade might be cost-prohibitive if its utility was limited to a particular system, or to a particular type of system.
These limitations are ironic in view of the fact that an extensive volume of information is typically available through the packet-switched network utilized by the telephone system. For example, many such networks are coupled to the Internet, and thus have access to the wealth of information which is in the subset of the Internet commonly known as the World Wide Web (WWW). Computers which use the network have ready access to most or all of the resources of the WWW. However, because existing telephone units for packet-switched networks are basically designed to communicate only with each other and with a call manager server, and are designed to carry out this communication through use of a dedicated protocol, they have no capability to access resources which may be available through the network but which cannot be accessed with the dedicated protocol. Stated differently, existing telephone units are not capable of using a public network communication protocol which will permit them to act as an independent network client with respect to available network resources that are not part of the specific telephone system itself.
From the foregoing, it may be appreciated that a need has arisen for a method and apparatus which provide telephone units of a network-based telephone system with the capability to independently access network resources outside the telephone system itself. According to the present invention, a method and apparatus are provided to address this need, and involve operating a control unit of a telephone unit so as to selectively cause the telephone unit to facilitate a telephony function by transmitting and receiving, through a network interface, message units of a first type which are in a digital format, and operating the control unit to selectively cause the telephone unit to function as an independent network client capable of communicating directly with a server by transmitting and receiving, through the network interface, message units of a second type which are in a digital format and which conform to a public network communication protocol.